After killing an old man, ISIS goes after the art he loved

ISIS has become renowned for posting gruesome videos online.

They behead people for clicks. It's that dark.

We told you about Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, who was brutally killed Tuesday by ISIS. Like others before him, the militant group beheaded Asaad, the foremost expert on Palmyra history, and then hanged his body from one of the Greco-Roman columns in the ancient city.

But the latest images aren't of killing or torture, but of a "war crime" of a different sort.

Members of the group blew apart a nearly 2,000-year-old Baalshamin temple. It's a UNESCO heritage site. Picture in your head a mini-Parthenon in the desert.

Andras Riedlmayer visited the Baalshamin temple in the 1970s as a grad student. He's now the director of Harvard's Documentation Center for Islamic Architecture. And he's familiar with what happens when place like Baalshamin becomes a target. He catalogued the destruction of art during the Balkans war.

He says there are several types of destruction that happen in war. “One is when monuments get caught in crossfire,” he says. “One is careless bombing, like the Saudi bombing of the Old City of Sa’na, Yemen, where they didn’t care if the old buildings get hit or not. This one, however, was the other type of destruction. There was no fighting going on. It was deliberate and it was targeted. This kind we see in ideological conflicts.”

So what does ISIS get out of destroying it?

Riedlmayer says it sends a message of power. “They can take this site, known around the world. They can destroy it and no one can stop us and no one can punish us. It sends a very powerful message to the people there saying, ‘We can destroy you just as easily.’”

But he says that’s just part of the reason ISIS destroyed Baalshamin. He says they also want to transform reality to fit the demands of their ideology. “Whether in the Balkans wars of the 1990s, or with the Islamic State, you have this ideology that rejects the concept of a universal patrimony. You want only that to exist which matches you idea of how things should be. Everything else, monuments and people, have to be removed.”

Simple put, it’s a direct challenge to a culture. It’s an effort to transform it.

“It transforms, most obviously, the present. No more world heritage site. No more tourism,” he says. “It transforms the future. What’s destroyed will never be. And it even destroys the past because you can never imagine it again anymore.”

Riedlmayer stresses that this is a modern ideological concept. He bristles when people call ISIS medieval, or primitive.

“The ruins of Palmyra, like the pyramids of Egypt, or the ruins in Iraq, coexisted with Islamic culture for 1,400 years and nobody tried to destroy them,” he says. “So this is a very modern kind of idea of transforming the landscape to fit your ideology.”